Sunday, 15th of November, 2015

LISTEN AGAIN because it’s raining – or because it’s not raining: stream on demand from FBi or podcast from here.

Wonderful discovery first up from White Noise Records in Hong Kong (one of the best record stores in the world if you like, er, “my kind of stuff”) – a trio from Macau called Evade. Part shoegaze, part dubby experimentalism, part glitchy electronics, it’s genuinely hard to pin down and I love that. And the packaging is gorgeous, as always from the Singapore-based Kitchen label.

In a similar vein is Mute Forest, aka Kael Smith, lead singer of ambient/experimental indie band Mombi. On the quiet end of song-based music, it has pleasing portions of subtle crunch in beats & production, and sinister turns here and there. The new album Deforestation is out now on Lost Tribe Sound and is accompanied by a remix EP called Reforestation with some more upbeat takes and a couple of excellent outtakes.

Marcus Whale‘s previous solo material went under the name Scissor Lock, but it’s fitting that he’s chosen to use his real name now. His voice made up a substantial part of the experimental and electronic sounds of Scissor Lock, but as Marcus Whale he’s writing songs, albeit pushing songform in uncomfortable directions, navigating against the same stars as These New Puritans, Björk, Liturgy even… but with his distinct voice cutting through. He’s an accomplished composer and producer, and also familiar from Collarbones and Black Vanilla – both brilliant (and different) takes on bass/r’n’b/hip-hop and club music. I’ve heard next year’s album and it’s heavy, intense and brilliant. You can see why this track is a separate single – it’s a different vibe, with muted piano, and beats which are more electronic than the tribal heaviness of the forthcoming album.

On Canberra’s community radio 2XX, Michael Norris and Reuben Ingall present a show called Subsequence Radio with impeccable taste. On their Bandcamp they’ve just released this year’s fundraiser to help them keep making the show, and I featured a great dark piece of electronic songwriting from the mysterious(?) P A R K S.

And now we come to the big feature of the show – (some of) the music of Katie English, aka Isnaj Dui. English is a flautist, classically trained, but also has a background in electro-acoustic music and Balinese gamelan among other things. She guests and collaborates with many excellent ambient, electronic, postrock and experimental musicians (a lot of which I had to skip over due to time constraints) – one of her other bands is Littlebow, featured tonight, which is a duo with Kieron Phelan of the legendary State River Widening in which the flute takes the lead in a postrock/folk rock band. But her solo stuff is even more special – her flute creates lugubrious ambient pulsations a la Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, or clicky or breathy rhythms, while at other times amp crackle intrudes, or almost folky repetitive patterns dance over slow-looped phrases. While she is highly respected in the ambient world, I feel English hasn’t got the recognition she deserves, so here’s a small tribute.

And finally, having played only one (admittedly long) track from Melbourne artist Robin Fox‘s new Editions Mego album last week, I thought I’d slip in a short bonus track from the release, with some more regular beats and glitchy sounds.

Labels and artists!

email: utilityfog at frogworth dot com
Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Whether cataloguing the jungle resurgence, tracking the ups and downs of noise and drone, or unearthing the remnants of glitch and folktronica, all is contextualised within artist & genre histories for a fulfilling sonic journey.
Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.